At the Library

The Noonday Demon

An Atlas of Depression

Winner of the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, The Noonday Demon examines depression in personal, cultural, and scientific terms. Drawing on his own struggles with the illness and interviews with fellow sufferers, doctors and scientists, policy makers and politicians, drug designers and philosophers, Andrew Solomon reveals the subtle complexities and sheer agony of the disease.

He confronts the challenge of defining the illness and describes the vast range of available medications, the efficacy of alternative treatments, and the impact the malady has on various demographic populations -- around the world and throughout history. He also explores the thorny patch of moral and ethical questions posed by emerging biological explanations for mental illness. With uncommon humanity, candor, wit, and erudition, award-winning author Solomon takes readers on a journey of incom-parable range and resonance into the most pervasive of family secrets. His contribution to our understanding not only of mental illness but also of the human condition is truly stunning.

Opinion

From the critics

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Comment

Very well researched and informational. A good part though was much too self-indulgent.

The last chapters, Hope and Since, were aggravating: gay white men (re: Dan Savage, Solomon, etc.) telling people "it gets better,' creating a campaign and ignoring that it only gets better for some people, a lot of them white men.

PS When he went over racial and cultural factors, he ironically wrote 2 sentences (out of a 44 page chapter on Populations) for Asians: "Many East Asians, for example, avoid the subject to the point of abject denial. In this spirit, a recent feature on depression in a Singapore magazine described the full range of medications, then ended by saying definitively 'Seek professional help if you need it, but in the meantime, cheer up.' For all his depression championing, and raising awareness of how it affects so much of the world's population, it feels terribly insulting to so blatantly ignore a group that accounts for 20%+ of humanity.

An overly long book: about eighty percent of it is the authors own waffling on about himself.
He has the weird ability to talk about buggering a total stranger in a public park with the hope of getting AIDS, but is able to spin it, like a fifteen year old perfidious girl, into something that we should feel sympathy towards him.
Some of what he says is so preposterous as to make one laugh out loud (eg., "I knew I wanted to be a novelist when I was three years old.")
The tone of the book is grating, for it reads like a 440 page article from a major newspaper.

This book should be REQUIRED READING for ALL HUMANITY!...Teachers,Scolars and Learning enthusiasts should READ and COMPREHEND the intended message of his detailed work on the subject of 'MENTAL ILLNESS"...No better book on this dark and mysterious subject CAN BE FOUND!..DON'T WAIT for the Libraries..order a copy from a book dealer near you TODAY!!!SIX STARS..no wait SEVEN STARS!!!!

Quotes

Four classes of antidepressant medication are currently available. The most popular are the SSRIs, which bring about higher brain levels of serotonin. Prozac, Luvox, Paxil, Zoloft, and Celexa are all SSRIs. There are also two older kinds of antidepressants. The tricyclics, named for their chemical structure, affect serotonin and dopamine. Elavil, Anafranil, Norpramin, Tofranil, and Pamelor are all tricyclics. The monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs) inhibit the breakdown of serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine. Nardil and Parnate are both MAOIs. Another category, atypical antidepressants, includes drugs that